


A Winter's Tale

by Blake



Category: AFI (Band), One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/F, Familiars, Femslash, MPDG Harry, Magic, Potions, Scars, Witches, blundering winter witch Davey, clumsy summer witch Harry, ye olde raven black hair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:14:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27250282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: In the cottage, there lived an old witch.
Relationships: Davey Havok/Harry Styles
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	A Winter's Tale

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on this whole spiritual journey and this love spell for Davey Havok is one of the things to come out of it! So here we are. I love fairy tales more each year.

Where the edge of town faded into forest and the roads were hidden beneath blankets of brown pine needles, there was a cottage. In the cottage, there lived an old witch. She was not really very old, by witch standards, but her face had many more lines carved into it than Harry’s did and her cottage was much more deeply buried in dead ivy vines than Harry’s was in roses, and so Harry thought of her as old.

Just beyond the old witch’s cottage, where the circle of un-growing things gave way to the green of the forest, Harry found a beehive burrowed into a thick oak tree, ten feet above her head. She sang a song to lull the bees to sleep so they would not know fear while she took a small piece of honeycomb, and once she had put it in a jar, lavender and rosemary sprang up under her feet, where the bees could easily find it when they woke.

Harry looked at the jar of honey, which was the same dark golden shine of her hair under sunlight. She had worried for a moment, when she first passed the old witch’s house, if honey from bees who lived so close to so many un-growing things would be poisonous to eat. But when she looked at its golden glow, she remembered that a little bit of sadness, processed once or twice through nature, made the best tasting sweetness.

She put the jar in her shoulder bag and began the walk back to town, humming as she went, and leaving behind an occasional rosemary bush or two. A black cat stood on a fallen tree and meowed at her in an angry cat voice. She tried to ignore the cat and focus on her excitement. She was going to use the honey to make the most delicious mead for herself, to keep her spirits bright all winter. She had spent all the warm months selling bright berries, sweet jams, and big smiles for the townsfolk so that they would welcome her presence, but she could not pass the snowy season sustained on their welcome alone.

“That honey belongs to the bees,” said a voice as tart as cranberries, which Harry feared was the old witch’s voice.

Her stomach flipped over when she turned around and saw the old witch standing on a tree stump behind her cottage, looking very much like an angry cat in the bristly carriage of her shoulders and the haughty tilt of her strong jaw. Harry reminded herself not to be afraid of witches, especially not ones who could not even grow things or charm bees. “To make something new, you have to take from something else.”

The old witch’s mouth puckered, as though the tartness of cranberry had caught up with her. Her black eyes flashed the way midnight flashes around lightning. “I know.”

Harry swallowed nervously, wondering if the old witch was defensive of her ineffective magic, or bitter about new things made or other things taken from. A wisp of something in Harry’s ribcage wanted to know, and it tugged her forward. “And to take from something else, you have to give something new,” she added sweetly as she walked, letting the hem of her long, flowing dress catch on and point to the leaves of the flowers she was leaving behind. She did not want the old witch to think her ungrateful or reckless.

Up close, the old witch did have crow’s feet by her eyes, and some grey at the edges of her long, black hair. But to Harry, she seemed the sort of old that would melt away under a smile.

The old witch abruptly picked up a big, wood-handled axe, but Harry was not afraid. “To make a fire, you have to feed it wood,” the old witch said as she stepped down from the stump and set a log in her place. Even though the words seemed to acknowledge the truth of what Harry said, they also felt like a dismissal, or the quietly firm banishment of a cat’s low growl.

But it lacked the harshness of a hiss, and so Harry tentatively pushed past it. “Are you making a fire?” she asked, watching the old witch’s strong arms wield the axe with an elegant confidence that spoke to decades of repeated motion. Her skin was scarred, burnt, and saggy in places. Harry wanted to know if it was warm to the touch.

“I already have a fire,” the old witch said, her voice as curt as the chop of the blade through crumbling pine. “But fires are hungry.”

Harry’s stomach grumbled at the word. The autumn air was cold, but not biting, so the old witch’s fire was probably not for heat alone. “What are you cooking on your fire?”

The old witch raised a dark eyebrow into a high arch on her forehead, but did not deign to look away from the log she was splitting. “Nothing that goes with stolen honey.”

But Harry wanted very badly to be invited in. She did not fully understand why she wanted to, but she had never had reason to doubt her instincts. She was certain that the old witch would not boil her into a stew, just as she had been certain that the bees would not sting her.

She extended her hand out into the path of the swinging axe. “I’m Harry. I’m a _good_ witch,” she said, and then waited for the axe not to fall.

Behind her, in the woods, a cat growled, but did not hiss.

“I’m Davey,” the old witch said, but instead of saying what kind of witch she was at all, she gathered up a piece of firewood and dropped it in Harry’s extended hand.

Harry followed Davey into the cottage with her arms full of heavy firewood, because to be invited to someone’s dinner table, you have to give something in exchange.

She hid her disappointment when she peeked inside the cauldron on the blazing fire and saw a purple, viscous potion instead of soup. She saved her dismayed expression for when Davey started tending the fire and Harry was free to turn around and pout at the wall.

But with a shock of guilt, she found herself pouting at Davey after all. Upon looking closer, she realized it was only a painted portrait of Davey. Upon looking even closer, she was not sure if it was Davey at all. There was something imperceptibly different about the picture, even as its dark brown eyes followed her around as she walked to the next picture frame. It, too, was a portrait of Davey, just a little bit different from the living one, and just as much different from the last painting as well. There were dozens of them, in a horizontal line across the room, all of them and yet none of them Davey. Harry did not know this magic. She could not even tell if it was magic Davey had done, or magic Davey was trying to undo. She could not tell if the knife wounds struck through some of the canvases were part of the magic, or part of the undoing. Her uneducated opinion on the subject was that Davey’s particular beauty was too complex for a painting.

While Davey still lingered by the fire, counting bubbles in the boiling pot and whispering to the smoke, Harry opened her bag and emptied its contents onto the kitchen table. Then she thought better of it and put the honey back in her bag where it would remain out of sight. That left only some red jams, bread, ripe pears, and a bottle of last year’s wine, which Harry always kept around for luck or love. If there was no soup, then at least two witches could make a feast out of bread and jam.

Harry peeled a pear with a knife which might have once ripped through a portrait. Then she handed the pear to Davey to slice and started to peel the next. At first, she liked watching Davey’s delicate, skeletal hands grow sticky with her careful movements. Then she noticed that the fruit was becoming stained and bruised under Davey’s touch, no matter how gentle those fingers looked. She took the pears back and asked Davey to mix some flour and sugar together, instead. Neither of them said anything about the bruising.

“What is it that you’re brewing?” Harry asked, watching Davey sift flour and hoping that wheat could not be injured further after being ground into flour.

“Just another potion to sell in town,” Davey answered after a long pause, as though she was considering whether or not Harry deserved to know anything about her life.

“What’s it for?” Harry had not recognized its purple color, and the only scent she could pick out was the burning pine of the fire.

“Lovesickness.”

Harry paused in her pear-peeling to read Davey’s face and make sure she was telling the truth. Lovesickness spells were usually healing spells, and Harry had never seen such an ugly healing potion before. “Interesting,” she said, not wanting to sound judgmental. “What’s in it?”

Davey pushed a hand through her raven black hair with a sigh. “Ivy leaves.”

Harry understood the frustrated sigh when she remembered the thick layers of dead ivy vines choking the entrance to Davey’s cottage. She must have picked them all clean. “So there’s a big demand for lovesickness potion in town, I take it?”

Davey’s eye twitched ever so slightly as she looked across the table to meet Harry’s gaze. “That’s the problem. The more I give them, the more they want.” Then, Davey looked down at her own hands, which were white with flour. She sighed again. “It was supposed to be a cure to lovesickness, but it’s actually a lovesickness spell. It makes them lovesick, constantly, and then they come asking for more again to cure it.”

Harry wished her hands were not covered in pear juice so that she could reach across and hold Davey’s pretty fingers in a comforting grip. Harry knew what it was like to have a spell come out differently than intended. She had once cast a spell to make the townspeople see her instead of ignoring her the way that people ignore all things they do not understand. Soon, she was being greeted by everyone in town, but by a hundred different names, for they all mistook her for someone dear in their life, and did not see her at all. “Can you change the recipe?”

“I tried.” The flour was gradually falling from Davey’s hands like dusty snow, remaining only in the furrows of her aged skin. “They came back demanding the original one. So I made it again and gave it to them. What do I care if they’re miserable, as long as they’re happy being miserable, and I don’t get cast out of town for upsetting them? Every once in a while, one of them gets desperate enough to come here and offer some blood to revive the ivy vines, and that’s good enough for me.”

Harry felt herself blanch at the casual mention of magic she would never even think to use. There had to be a way to help Davey out of what was clearly an unsustainable situation. She just had to get to the bottom of the matter, and that required knowing the recipe. “How did you come up with the lovesickness potion in the first place?”

Davey went silent and did not tell Harry until after the pear cobbler was on the fire, beside the great cauldron. In the meantime, Harry complimented her cave-like pantry full of grain and potatoes, and expressed her jealousy for how well prepared for winter Davey was. There was a smell of snow on the air, even though it was only November, and all Harry had in her own kitchen was jam, for she had spent all summer enjoying the ritual of eating fruits and vegetables that spoil within days of picking.

Once the cobbler was cooking, Davey asked Harry to peel and cut some potatoes in an almost shameful tone of voice that suggested it was not just pears that Davey habitually bruised just by touching. Davey seemed to watch Harry’s hands even more intently than Harry had watched hers. It made Harry’s hands feel pretty, to be looked at by someone who had seen so much. Even if that person was a sad, bad witch who bruised fruit and made potions that made people happy to be miserable.

“I made the spell for myself, first,” Davey said once Harry’s eyes were averted from the pale, sharp blades of her face and the crimson spill of her lips. “That’s why it will never work.”

There was a question there that Harry wanted to ask, but could not quite grasp. She was not the quickest-thinking witch in the world. She settled for, “Because they’re sick for your love?” It was only after she asked it that she realized that wisp in her ribcage wanted Davey not to have made the potion for her own lovesickness, because that would mean that Davey had been in love, and that she had been hurting, and if the potion did not work, then she probably was still in love and still hurting. Harry hated the idea, but could not say why.

“Because it did not work for me,” Davey said, correcting Harry’s childish question and confirming her unspoken fears.

“Oh, Davey,” Harry said with a voice thick with sadness and apology. Before she could stop herself, she was reaching out to wrap her potato-starchy hand around Davey’s bony wrist, which twitched under the touch but did not flinch away.

Once the potatoes were boiling beside the cauldron and above the pear cobbler, Harry gathered the courage to ask what she was afraid to hear the answer to for reasons she was afraid to ask herself. “Who was the person? The one you were lovesick for?” She hoped the person was someone like her. She did not know why she hoped this, except for some vague idea that the insight of similarity might help her solve the problem of Davey’s imbalanced magic.

Davey ate a spoonful of Harry’s raspberry jam. Her mouth twisted at its sweetness, or else at the bitterness of memory. “A man who was afraid to live on the outskirts of town, afraid of pitchforks and fire. And truth.”

“A fool,” Harry declared before realizing it was insensitive to say so of someone Davey was probably still lovesick over. Then she realized she did not care if it was insensitive; Davey should know that only a fool would choose fear over love.

Davey did not respond to that, other than to tilt her head to the side in a mild shrug of consideration. Her eyes looked less black and more deeply brown as the sun set outside, or as Harry grew accustomed to their darkness. “He left me to live with another woman. Someone who draws fewer suspicious stares. Someone who can thrive in the center of town. Someone prettier.”

“No!” Harry objected to this point. She doubted, in this moment, that there was anyone prettier than the sad woman before her.

Davey smiled indulgently, as a favor to Harry, it seemed, instead of anything vain. “Someone younger,” she offered as an amendment to her prior statement. Then her dark eyes flickered across Harry’s head. “Someone more like you, actually.”

It would have broken Harry’s heart if it had not been accompanied by the closest thing to a laugh she had heard from Davey’s lips. Harry felt herself smiling, despite the pain of knowing that not only was she nothing like the person Davey had fallen in love with, she _was_ like the person Davey probably resented most in the world.

Then, a miracle happened, and Harry’s heart was saved from pain. Davey reached across the table and wiped across Harry’s mouth with her thumb, which was stained red from jam when she pulled it back and said, “She’s not half as lovely and nice, though.”

Harry spared half a thought to the scary-looking hex jars she had spotted on the windowsill that she suspected might give this other woman plenty of reason not to be nice to Davey. But the rest of her mind was swelling full of feeling. Davey had touched her mouth and called her lovely.

She was amazed and moved to see that Davey was not the sort of old that melted away under a smile; in fact, her crow’s feet grew wings and she looked more beautiful for having known sadness and mirth and being able to keep both alive on her face all at once.

Harry blushed and turned back to her task of stripping bay leaves off their branches, since she had clearly been caught taking breaks to eat jam out of its jar.

While she worked, Davey told her about the portraits, about the scars, and all her other failed attempts to change her appearance to suit her wishes, or the man’s wishes, or the wishes whose origin she could no longer remember. The ivy had been to hide their house, initially, to keep them safe and unseen like he wanted, before he had left Davey with nothing to do but find some other use for its leaves.

While she switched to picking juniper berries, careful not to crush them before they could dry, she told Davey about the time that the townspeople started seeing her as whomever they wished to see, and the time when she was very young and fell in love with a dryad, and the time she did a rain spell and flooded the river, and about her roses, her chickens, her orchard, and whatever else Davey seemed to want to hear about.

When they finally ate the cobbler and mashed potatoes, there was a warm, easy silence between them, though it thrummed in the warm, easy way of a heartbeat. Harry poured the wine she brought, but Davey lifted a hand in refusal.

Harry pouted. “But it’s for luck. Or love.”

Davey shook her head, swallowing a bite. “I don’t like illusions.”

Harry doubted the logic of that, coming from someone who sold poison under another name, but she did not think it would be nice to point that out. And Davey had called her nice. “But I made it, from my own grapes. It’s really good. They’re good illusions.”

The smile on Davey’s face made up for the fact that she politely refused again and turned her head toward her plate. Her eyelashes cast long, dark shadows across her face, flickering in the firelight like beautiful creatures.

Harry drank both glasses of wine, for luck, or love.

When the fire started to die, Harry offered to go gather more firewood, but Davey said she needed the dark and the cold to finish the potion. Harry did not want to go, but she did not feel she could stay. Frost was crawling at the edges of her wine-warmth, and she did not want to touch the lovesickness potion. She wanted to _save_ Davey from the lovesickness potion.

But some magic required time and patience. Harry tried to find some of the latter, though the rapid flurrying of her heart made it feel very difficult. She gathered her empty jars and bottles and placed them carefully in her bag, alongside the honeycomb for the mead she was going to use to stay warm all winter in her cottage, alone. The mead would be so much better shared, as would the winter.

She looked at Davey’s dark figure hunched over the fire, outlined in dim orange embers. “May I come by again soon? I love your cottage.”

Davey turned toward her and stood up straight. She was shorter than Harry, but strong in her slightness, and Harry’s limbs longed to drape themselves over her in an embrace. “No one has ever said that before,” Davey said with a voice light with laughter or surprise.

“Which part?” Harry was not feeling particularly clever right now, as she looked into the white shimmering reflections of Davey’s endless dark eyes.

“Well, neither.” Davey crossed her arms tight across her chest, which probably meant she did not want to be embraced. “But you can come visit again, sure.”

With that, Harry decided it was safe to acknowledge the thought that had been skittering around in her brain, unnamed until now: she loved Davey, and she wanted Davey to love her. She would make Davey feel loved and listened to. Some magic required time and patience.

Respecting Davey’s crossed arms, Harry picked up the fluffy black cat who had wandered into the house halfway through dinner and started rubbing against her legs. She kissed the cat’s purring head and set it down on the table to find some tasty crumbs.

Then she opened the door and tried to walk past the threshold, but some solid thing in her way pushed her stumbling back into the house. Harry was a clumsy witch, but she could hardly take responsibility for the giant block of _something_ standing in her way.

“What?” she asked, climbing to her feet again to feel the doorway. It was vegetation of some sort, thick with leaves and sturdy with branches. It was a solid wall of greenery, covering the whole doorway. Harry poked her hand through it, and then her head, and then it seemed silly to her that she had not recognized it as ivy right away. “Davey,” she called in excitement.

Davey came to her side so quickly that it made Harry want to call her a hundred times and feel her rush to find her, if only for the feeling of being found and seen in the dark. “It’s your ivy.”

“Did you do this?” was Davey’s immediate question, while the dim ghost of her hand sunk deep into the vines.

“I don’t think so.” Harry felt the wall of vines with both her hands, delighted, like a child feeling the first snow with her palms. “And I can usually only grow plants if I’m trying to. I’ve never accidentally grown something.”

“Maybe,” Davey started, but she cut herself off with a thinking type of sound. She turned around and leaned with her back against the vines. “Maybe I accidentally—? But, no. And it’s greener.”

Harry could not stand not being able to see the details of Davey’s facial expressions in the dark. She touched her palm to Davey’s cheek, delighted, like a child in the first snow. “Maybe our magic worked together.”

She felt Davey’s smile in her hand. It was the same smile she had worn when they cooked together and talked, prepared herbs and exchanged glances, eaten together and shared silences. Then, it had made Harry’s heart flutter; now, the flutter was a thunder. “Maybe,” Davey murmured, little more than a whisper, “my magic likes yours.”

Harry could not hold herself upright anymore, so she let herself drop to lean into Davey’s hands, which were suddenly right there at her waist, and she rested her forehead on Davey’s, which did not even feel furrowed in any frown. “Maybe your magic wants me to stay a little bit longer?” Harry asked hopefully, feeling around in each breathful of air for a taste of the smile she can still feel splitting Davey’s lips apart.

Their mouths found each other easily in the dark of the cottage on the edge of the woods. Between the kissing, the laughing, and the pleading whimpers, there was no room for word of surprise when the ivy pushed them into the house and shut the door to protect them from the night. When Davey slammed into a wall, thirty picture frames all fell to the floor and shattered at once, but Harry’s moans drowned out the sound as she finally got to feel beautiful scars coming to life under her hands. And when the potion in the cauldron turned a strange, bright green, and then burst suddenly into a bright rosy pink, the only sounds of delighted surprise were coming from the bedroom.

**Author's Note:**

> [moodboard for the fic!](https://newleafover.tumblr.com/post/633250596117495808/a-winters-tale-by-blake-4k-ff-davey)


End file.
